SPRINGFIELD, Mo. – Sen. John McCain said Wednesday that he wanted 45 new nuclear reactors built in the United States by 2030, a course he called “as difficult as it is necessary.”
In his third straight day of campaign-speech making about energy and $4-a-gallon gasoline, McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, told the crowd at a town-hall-style meeting at Missouri State University that he saw nuclear power as a clean, safe alternative to traditional sources of energy that emit greenhouse gases. He said his ultimate goal was 100 new nuclear plants.
The Arizona senator has long promoted nuclear reactors, but Wednesday was the first time that he specified the number of plants he envisioned. Currently there are 104 reactors in the country supplying some 20 percent of electricity consumed. No new nuclear power plant has been built in the United States since the 1970s.
“China, Russia and India are all planning to build more than a hundred new power plants among them in the coming decades,” McCain said in this pocket of Missouri that is reliably Republican.
“Across Europe there are 197 reactors in operation, and nations including France and Belgium derive more than half their electricity from nuclear power. And if all of these nations can find a way to carry out great goals in energy policy, then I assure you that the United States is more than equal to the challenge.”
Although there has been a shift of opinion in the industry and among some environmentalists toward more nuclear power – it is clean and far safer than at the time of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979 – most environmentalists are skeptical of the latest claims by its advocates. They also say that no utility will put its own financing into building a plant unless the federal government lavishly subsidizes it.
“Wall Street won’t invest in these plants because they are too expensive and unreliable, so Senator McCain wants to shower the nuclear industry with billions of dollars of taxpayer handouts,” said Daniel J. Weiss, who heads the global warming program at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research group.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain’s chief domestic policy adviser, said McCain arrived at the goal of 45 as consistent with his desire to expand nuclear power, “but not so large as to be infeasible given permitting and construction times.”
